Pipe Dreams and Promises

Last week I found out that someone I love very, very much was so addicted to drugs that he became homeless. It's the second time this has happened to me. I remember five years ago going to the wrecked apartment of a friend in the music industry. Clothes, garbage, and kitchenware were heaped across the floor. He was probably looking for an imaginary baggie of heroin that he thought he’d stashed in dirty jeans or the cookie jar. Some friends and I staged a mini-intervention and all but tied him to the seat of a plane to get him to rehab. He got clean, dirty, clean. He’s still battling.

Now the streets have claimed another person I care about. He’s also deeply creative, a musician. Troubled. Usually kind. It’s heroin. Maybe cocaine. I worry and pray.

Why do some of the most creative people immolate on drugs? Everyday Kurt Cobains, they slip into the routines of addiction like an old soft shoe. Maybe these dreamers are too bruised by today’s harsh realities to face them head on.

Most folks I know who experiment (or more) with illicit drugs are no more screwed up than average. It’s easy to call addicts weak and lazy. It’s harder to look at the role drugs play in all our lives.

The spectrum of drug use in America is broad and deep. In 1998, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey said alcohol caused the most drug violence. (Just watch “Cops.”) Five times as many Americans die from alcohol abuse as illicit/illegal drugs. The alcohol industry pays $2 billion a year to promote the consumption of beer, wine, and spirits. Increasingly, sweet malt beverages are snaring the 10 million underage drinkers.

Tobacco kills even more people. Switzerland's Addiction Research Institute notes that tobacco is the primary killer addiction worldwide and in America. In 2000, 4.9 million people across the world died from tobacco, 71 percent of drug-related deaths. The fact that it’s legal dulls many of us -- me included --- into thinking that nicotine is different. But at least two of my friends, both incredible women, have been cycling on and off tobacco like junkies battling the urge to shoot up. It comes down to this: Legal drugs, the most lethal, are taxable. Illegal drugs are not.

America’s drug laws are both draconian and racist. Even though white Americans consume the majority of illegal drugs, black and brown Americans -- a fraction of the population -- are the majority of those convicted for drug crimes.

Sometimes, as in the infamous Tulia, Texas cases, drugs are merely a pretext for railroading African-Americans. Two weeks ago, New York Magazine’s cover featured Lucy Grealy. Undergoing reconstruction for facial cancer, the author of "Autobiography of a Face" slipped from the bestseller lists into heroin addiction. Eric Breindel, the conservative New York Post editorial page editor who died from complications from his heroin addiction, has a scholarship named after him rather than a jail wing. This knowledge doesn’t change the fact that most of the people I see strung out on the streets -- shuffling, nodding, hollow-eyed -- look more like me than Grealy or Breindel. Money lets you hide your problems, and race and money are Siamese twins.

Our government’s response to drug use is to launch the new “Operation Pipe Dreams.” As we duct-tape our windows against bioterrorism, Attorney General John Ashcroft has deployed 1,200 federal agents to catch businesses that encourage smoking up. Federal law bars the sale of products targeted towards illegal drug use, including bongs and marijuana pipes. (Just tell that to my nabe, the Village, head shop central.) So far, authorities have charged at least 55 stores and Internet retailers with selling illegal drug paraphernalia.